Nazarite Sea-Rovers of the Wolfen Kindred

My ancestors were Swan Brethren who may have worshipped Saint Anne over her daughter Mary. “n the decades between 1480 and 1520 the production of images of Saint Anne with the Virgin and Child increased in Germany and the Netherlands in an unprecedented manner. This increase followed on the extensive promotion of the saint’s cult by Netherlandish and Rheinland German humanists and reforming clerics that began in the 1480s, manifesting itself in the founding of confraternities dedicated to her and in the writing of lives and other texts. These texts, which were republished elsewhere in Germany, were of crucial importance in heightening Anne’s popularity for they attributed to her a power unprecedented in saints’ lives, the power to help souls achieve salvation. This power which Anne enjoyed thanks to her fleshly relationship with the Redeemer and his mother, had special appeal for German Christians, who in the fifteenth century were showing a heightened concern over individual salvation. This attempt to encourage membership in St. Anne confraternities was part of a larger clerical program to control and shape lay piety in the late medieval North, in part in response to anxieties over lay, especially lay women’s, religious activities, in part in response to financial pressures.”